I’m leaning to one of the following options but could use your help in understanding the differences between some of them.
1. WordPress with OptionsTree and Free/Paid Themes (coding required)
2. Theme Hybrid with the Hybrid Core (coding required)
3. Genesis with Genesis Extender
4. Dynamic Website Builder for Genesis
5. Catalyst with Dynamik Theme

I had long list of capabilities in my first post but the most important include: Responsive Websites, Child Themes, Multisite, Drag and Drop/Configurable Builder, HTML5 and CSS3, Multi Language Support, SEO Optimized/Best Practices, and general compatibility with existing themes and plugins (buddy press, bbpress, feedburner, etc).

I’m thinking options 4 or 5 above are my 2 best choices with Hybid close behind but my impression is the much coding will be required with Hybrid. I hope to get several sites online this year and don’t mind spending some money if I know my investment will pay off (mostly time learning the solution).

Sorry, I missed your last reply until now. If you’re going to be building themes, you should really be diving into code anyway, so that’s not an issue.

Responsive Web sites

Irrelevant in terms of theme frameworks. Responsive design is something you’re going to have to do on your own anyway.

CSS3

Irrelevant in terms of theme frameworks. Use it. Don’t use it. It’s up to you.

Multisite

Any theme or framework should support multisite out of the box. There’s generally nothing special that needs to be done.

Multi-language support

I’m sure all of the mentioned frameworks are internationalized. I can’t say for certain, but that should be pretty standard.

SEO optimized

That’s all about your HTML. If you’re building a child theme based off one of the parent themes you mentioned, that should be taken care of. If you’re building a [parent] theme off of a theme framework (Hybrid, Carrington, WP Framework, etc.), this is simple to do.

As far as meta, titles, and things of that nature, plugin territory.

BuddyPress/bbPress support

Again, this is really up to you as the theme developer. There might be some framework features that need additional support for those things, but it’s generally not much. I know I have a few bbPress-specific bits of code in Hybrid Core.

Framework and theme comparisons

Really, you’re trying to compare apples and oranges. To break down a few of your options:

Hybrid Core: Essentially, this is a library of scripts meant to aid in theme development. You pick and choose the scripts that you want to “deploy” in your theme.

Genesis: This is basically a parent theme that allows you to create child themes. The HTML and everything is done for you. You can basically just come in and write CSS (for the most part). This is probably comparable to several of the other “frameworks” (i.e., advanced parent themes) you mentioned.

Options Tree: This is a script that makes it easy to roll out theme options (not that it’s really hard with the Settings API anyway).

I’m not really sure about the other things. I hope I didn’t misrepresent Genesis or Options Tree either.

If you are not a really experienced Web Developer/Coder, my personal opinion is that anything you can do to accelerate the process and reduce coding is a benefit. If you have a good code base to handle all the routine template stuff then you don’t need a Framework. It is a tradeoff between flexibility and capability as any package will have limitations over creating the site from scratch with your own code. After much evaluation I chose Genesis with the Dynamic Web Site Builder.

actually, i have rebuilt my own framwork theme based on wordpress’s default themes since the second one (going to release this feb).i recommend you to use those ones because all plugins are built and compatible to them.

with admin framework you can choose the most popuplar that updates regularly like options tree or options framework plugin, warp… to save your time.

Manh said
actually, i have rebuilt my own framwork theme based on wordpress’s default themes since the second one (going to release this feb).i recommend you to use those ones because all plugins are built and compatible to them.

Is not so clear to me..so your advice is to start building my own framework,based on the default wp themes?

GJThemes said
That’s the best way…start with WP as itself, explore it, play with it, and then once you feel comfortable enough, then venture outward to the popular frameworks. You could always try the Warp I mention, but you may also want to try out Justin’s Hybrid as he has been around for a long time and he definitely knows his WordPress code. Realize that learning WP and a framework won’t happen over night so take it slow, one step at a time, then as I said, venture into the more sophisticated levels of WP development for themes. You could start with a theme but please note that many authors here at Themeforest do awesome designs but they also do their own coding methods, some good some bad. Because of this, I still say start with the core of WP and go through the wordpress site and it’s docs (codex) and play with the TwentyTwelve theme first. The closer you keep to the authentic WP code, the better.

I am also releasing wordpress theme soon and already tested several framework but at the last I had found TwentyTwelve is best for new comer in wordpress.So my suggestion is to use and play with TwentyTwelve .

ok..i agree with you about starting with TwentyTwelve, but i saw many other free themes on internet,even better then default wp themes..i see everybody is recommending to start learning php and javascript but i never saw any php tutorials based on wordpress..i mean learning all the php functions etc it would take at least 1 year ..apart the fact that wordpress also is releasing every year new types of codding methods..in my opinion a php tutorial based on wp will save time and frustration for many people ..any of you it happens to know such kind of tutorials?